In an attempt to reinforce the notion that the player of the game "is" the Player Character, most early games went out of their way to avoid applying any characterization to the player character.

More often than not, a thorough examination of the game will cause this to break down as providing any kind of substantial interaction with a player character who is a cipher is problematic. Most often, the first thing to slip through will be a tacit assumption that the character is male.

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Less common in its extreme form today, as it makes anything like compelling storytelling highly problematic. Much easier to achieve in Interactive Fiction, for the same reason that text is better suited to the Tomato Surprise, and to this day, many text games still take this approach, and enthusiasts have been known to be disappointed if forced to play a character who does not reflect their gender or sexual orientation.

Beyond adventures, most games at least need to graphically present the player, so some amount of customization is required. The result is often an extended form of Purely Aesthetic Gender, with little additional influence on the story.

Video Game Examples:

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Action Adventure

The main character in Overlord. Besides being male, all his features are obscured and blurred out by his impressive helmet. He's also never referred to by name by his former friend and colleagues. The later Overlords in other games are given some degree of Backstory, with the sequel starting him off as a Creepy Child along with several nicknames while the prequel Overlord: Dark Legend gives the Overlord the name Lord Gromgard though they still remain relatively faceless, wearing face-obscuring clothing before donning their armor.

Link from The Legend of Zelda series was originally meant to be this... in fact, that was the very reason he was named Link, because he was the "link to the gameworld", simply a player avatar. Ironically, he is now one of the most recognizable faces in all of gaming, endlessly tributed and/or parodied. Giving him a distinctive, recurring costume probably didn't help. This is most prevalent in the instruction manuals for A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening which are written using Second-Person Narration rather than referring to Link by name as Link. While Nintendo is still trying to retain some of Link's Featureless Protagonist qualities (the reason he is still a Heroic Mime), he seems to be growing out of this in the later games, especially with regards to his personality. A notable shift is in Twilight Princess where the name Link is pre-entered on the Hello, [Insert Name Here] screen unlike earlier games where there is no default name and the field starts out blank. Taken to the next level in Breath of the Wild where Link's name is set in stone and cannot be changed due to the use of voice acting. While Link is still a silent protagonist, he has a backstory that's more fleshed out compared to his previous incarnations and many of the dialogue options greatly show off Link's personality.

In the second game of the Star Control saga, the player character is only referred in second person, or at most third (Young starship captain from Earth, alien, hunam, and the like). Game's background history as well as some dialog (mostly with Talana) and its ending present the character as a young male.

The player character in Ghostbusters: The Video Game is one of these, as Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis figured that was the best way for the jokes to work. There is also an in-story reason: the team is still very shaken up by what happened to the previous new recruit so they refuse to learn even your name to avoid emotional attachments.

Interestingly, all the Ghostbusters wear easy-to-read nametags on their uniforms. Including the unnamed player character. Thing is, you have to work to see it, because you spend most of the game staring at your characters backside. If you manage to get a good look at it, you'll see it simply says "ROOKIE".

In Saints Row, both Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV do this in the first mission, before you've created your custom character. In both games, you start covered head to toe in clothing, including a full-head mask and gloves, in an effort to keep your race, gender, and voice ambiguous. Highly averted for the rest of the game, where your created character ("Boss") participates heavily in cutscenes, and speaks plenty, using one of seven sets of dialogue depending on which voice you choose. There is one way it's played straight all game though; most dialogue referring to Boss uses a gender-neutral "they" instead of "he" or "she".

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: All of the main Assassin's Creed games are actually simulations being experienced by someone from the present day, who needs to find something important in the memories. Due to the main protagonist's death by Heroic Sacrifice in the previous game, the "main character" of Black Flag is about as nameless and featureless a protagonist can get. He or she is a Heroic Mime with no lines, the present day segments of the game are all shown in first person, and there are no mirrors so the player can't even see their character's reflection.

Adventure

Dark Fall: The Journal is bold enough to give the player character a nationality and approximate age range, but still sees fit to leave the character genderless. The full name of the PC's brother is given, but there's no guarantee that the PC is male or single, so may not share the same surname as him.

In The Journeyman Project, the player is only referred to as "Agent 5", and though we see his reflection, his face is computer-generated and featureless (all other characters are photorealistic). He gets a full name (Gage Blackwood), identity, and face in both of its sequels, as well as the remake, Pegasus Prime. Perhaps as a bit of Lampshade Hanging, in the second game, the player comes across an action figure of himself (the events of the first game had been turned into a popular action movie) with the same mannequin features.

The player character's gender in the Myst series is never made specific; Atrus only ever refers to you as "my friend." Thanks to the Myst games being a series however, the need for a persistent player character is met quite cleverly, by only providing "hints" here and there about the character as they become Atrus' family's friend. This more encourages players either to perceive themselves as part of the story or use their own imaginations, rather than leaving one to wonder who they're playing. The avoidance of even hinting at gender might almost be called impressive — though a couple of points in the series do present players with the ability to create a customizable character.

It should be noted that Word of God places the first four Myst games some two-hundred years in the past, which breaks the concept of "the player as him/herself" somewhat. Both Uru and Myst V are set in the present (with certain key characters still alive because the D'ni live very long) and therefore feature a different protagonist. In Uru it's explicitly meant to be the player (one of the meanings of "Uru" is "You Are You"), but recent Word of God has declared that the protagonist of Myst V is Dr. Watson of the D'ni Restoration Council (an NPC in Uru, and the in-universe counterpart of developer Richard A Watson).

Though a non-canon storyline/walkthrough for the original in the Prima Strategy guide alludes the player character as a male photographer from modern day finding the Myst book in a dusty old library which apparently sent him backwards in time. Other than that, the character in the guide is curious, clever, reacts to the few jump scares the game has with obvious results, and is slightly snarky, especially when Sirrus and Achenar start to threaten him if he doesn't bring more pages. "Player: You're a book, what are you going to do? Throw footnotes at me?"

The only personal information established about your in-game persona in Riddle of the Sphinx and its sequel The Omega Stone is gender, which you can choose in the second game. The only time it ever comes up is in found letters' being addressed either to "sir" or "madam".

In Shivers and its sequel, though the player is given a home town and set of friends, he is only ever referred to by others as "You", and only ever described in gender-neutral terms.

Except near the very end when you fall down a large slide and your screams are clearly masculine.

The Crystal Key, like Myst, handles this by showing everything from a first-person perspective and having almost no one with whom to interact (the occasional enemy soldiers don't speak your language). Unlike Myst, however, items don't teleport from the main screen to your inventory and back again—they levitate, as if you're telekinetic. Also of note is that you abruptly stop being a Heroic Mime if you're caught and tortured, but gender neutrality is still preserved—the resultant screaming is barely recognizable as human, let alone male or female.

The sequel averts it, as you play as the original protagonist's son, Call Lifeson. He hails from planet Evany, has a voice, face, and body. Athera's tablet diary also states that Call's dad was a colonel.

Some games give your character a gender-neutral name (e.g. in Rhiannon, you're "Chris") to allow some sense of identity without excluding any gender.

In Find the Cure!! the player character is a member of a search party who discovered a portal to another dimension, and that's as far as their description goes.

The English-dubbed version of Detalion's Reah: Face the Unknown has a journalist who does speak quite a bit throughout the game, but other than his desire to be famous, we know nothing about him. However, everyone in the environment seems to have seen him before, and a phantom alchemist knows why. The player even hangs a nice lampshade on being faceless during a mirror puzzle.

Why can't I see myself? I'm not a vampire, after all.

Played with in Robot City, like the novels it's based on. The main character is a man named Derec only because of a label on his jumpsuit, which is actually the name for a company that makes jumpsuits; his DNA and facial patterns have no match in any Earth or Spacer database; and he has have no memories from before waking up in an Escape Pod that crash-landed in the eponymous city. All this becomes a problem when two other humans show up later, one of them having been murdered, as the first law of robotics forbids any robot from killing humans, pinning Derec as the prime suspect.

The BIONICLE Mata Nui Online Game is played in first-person and you're only ever referred to by your title of "Chronicler". Then near the end of the game, it's revealed that you're playing as Takua, the Matoran who later becomes Toa Takanuva.

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Edutainment Game

All of the games in the Super Solvers series let you input your own name, plus the hero wears a unisex outfit and their gender is never disclosed. In Mission: T.H.I.N.K, Treasure Galaxy! and the Windows updates of the preceding games, Morty avoids using pronouns when referring to the Super Solver.

The player character in almost all Carmen Sandiego games is completely faceless and unidentifiable, only referred to by their rank (Senior Investigator, Gumshoe, Master Detective, etc.) The NPCs you typically speak with to gather clues never reference the player, outside of "How do you do?"

First Person Shooter

Word of God says this is the reason why the DoomMarine never talks. He was meant to be the player character, and thus was never given an official name and never speaks. Played less straight than other examples as you do know what he looks like, but nevertheless, he was meant to be the player. The 2016 DOOM (2016) gets away from this a little by managing to give him a visible personality through body language alone, despite the fact that he never speaks nor shows his face even once, even if that personality can be summed up as "angry as fuck".

The first BioShock starts out like this — the only clue to your nature are your hands, which are white, kind of masculine and have little tattoos of chain links on the wrists; and your voice, heard only in the opening cutscene, which has a nondescript American accent. Then it gets weird and you find out the details of your identity. Jack also seems to lack a shadow, but that's an oversight on the developer's part.

If you examine the photographs pinned up right outside Ryan's office, you can see Jack's face captured in a couple of them.

If you pay attention, you'll notice that Jack is freaking huge, assuming that everything in the game is made for normal human size, he is easily seven feet tall. It does explain how he can convincingly disguise as a Big Daddy.

In BioShock 2, the protagonist has a name (Subject Delta) and an appearance (Alpha Big Daddy), but lacks any speech or real personality.

You can find out Delta is a character that's only referenced in audio logs from before Rapture went to hell. However, the details of this character is kept vague outside that he's a man who went deep sea diving as an occupation for lost ships and planes and accidentally found Rapture by chance. It's even noted the name given may not be his birth name.

Also averted in the single player DLC, "Minivera's Den". You play a character who appears to be yet another Alpha series (Subject Sigma) like the main game. But you progress and find out that the character's name (Charles Milton Porter) and all about his life before becoming a big daddy as the DLC progresses. It even Ends with him seemingly leaving rapture as human again.

Averted in BioShock Infinite, where the player character possesses a name (Booker Dewitt), voice, appearance, personality, fleshed-out backstory, and a clear driving goal.

Downplayed with the protagonists from System Shock games. The first games features a normal looking male white hacker with the mullet, and the second game has the male white soldier with cyber-eyes. Both of them receive some degree of characterization, though they largely function as stand-ins for the player in actual gameplay.

The Kickstarted Remake of the first game is promising a gender option, further allowing more elements of featureless protagainst/avatar status to fit the player's molding.

In the original trilogy, the Master Chief John-117 never shows his face, speaks only a handful of lines during cutscenes, and is referred to almost solely by his rank. The one time he takes off his helmet, the camera angle shifts to obscure his face just as he removes it; even when using cheats to keep his head in frame, all we get to see is another helmet! He has a bit more personality than usual examples of this trope, though.

His character is heavily expanded on in the expanded universe (particularly the various adaptations of Halo: The Fall of Reach), which also reveal that he is a white man with brown hair, though the only clear visual depictions of his face we ever get are of him as a child.

From Halo 4 onward, Chief drifts away from being this, since unlike Bungie, 343 Industries were specifically aiming to explore his personality. He speaks during gameplay as well as cutscenes, and 4's Legendary ending even gives us a brief glimpse of the area around his eyes when he takes off his helmet.

The Rookie in Halo 3: ODST never removes his helmet or says anything. The only clue about his appearance is his fingers, which are white. His initials are apparently "J.D.", but that seems to be more of a reference to the generic placeholder name "John Doe". He gets a little more characterization in the Halo: Evolutions short story Dirt and the novella Halo: New Blood, but not much.

SPARTAN-B312 AKA Noble Six, the protagonist of Halo: Reach, is perhaps the ultimate example of this trope in the series, since the player gets to determine everything about the character from the gender to the appearance of the armor. S/he only speaks a handful lines, and we never get to see even a micrometer of him/her that is not covered in armor.

In Marathon, the protagonist is drawn in a few art pieces, but his appearance is very inconsistent. You can only see what he looks like in-game in co-op, and he's wearing what looks like a flight helmet, which only reveals his jaw.

The game files of Half-Life 2 don't contain a character model or skin for Freeman at all: since there are no reflective surfaces or (legitimately accessible) third person perspective, the player never gets to actually see anything but his arms. The only reference to Freeman's facial appearance is on the game's box art.

In the early (or just pirated) version of the game it was possible to look at your PC head, which revealed a mannequin face not actually covered in textures.

The more recent Call of Duty games have this in effect for most of the multiple player characters, who never speak and are never seen in third person. One notable exception is 'Soap' MacTavish, who is the primary player character in Modern Warfare, but your squad's commander in the sequel, in which he has a full speaking part.

Averted with Alex Mason and Jason Hudson from Black Ops, who are both fully voiced. Hudson appears in some missions where you play as Mason, and Mason's face is shown a lot in the between-mission cutscenes. This is likewise averted for Alex's son David in Black Ops II and, to a lesser extent, for the never-named Player in Black Ops III.

Modern Warfare 3 zig-zags this. For Frost, Burns and Harkov, it's played completely straight (you do see a brief glimpse of Frost's head at the start, but his face is completely covered), but Yuri averts this, as his face is one of the first things you see in the cutscene before his first mission, and you can get another good look at him while remote-controlling a UGV as him in that mission. And, for the final level, you get to control Captain Price instead, with Yuri as an NPC - notable also for averting Heroic Mime, otherwise omnipresent in the Modern Warfare games (Yuri gets lines in cutscenes before then but, with one exception, not a single word in actual gameplay).

The only thing we know about Alcatraz, the Delta Force Marine in Crysis 2, is that he's fond of tequila, though the tie-in novel Crysis: Legion does expand on his character a bit. Nomad, the protagonist of the first game, had lines and a personality but it was very subdued due to him not speaking much. The protagonist of the Expansion Pack, Psycho, received significantly more lines, emotions, and actually had a face compared to Nomad's One-Way Visor in response to criticism of Nomad being completely forgettable.

FEAR's lead protagonist, Point Man, is, aside from being specified to be male, basically a Featureless Protagonist. This is actually practically canon, considering that he is later revealed to have no memory and be one of a number of clone soldiers birthed by Alma. The third game finally revealed his appearance. Beckett from Project Origin is in mostly the same boat, only having a confirmed name and vaguely-defined appearance over the Point Man, though he does reappear in the back half of the third game, with a speaking role.

The Pyro from Team Fortress 2, whose nationality (notable considering s/he's on a team of national stereotypes) and gender are unknown. Never removes that gas mask, is known only by Pyro, and speaks only in muffled grunts. (S)he does have some characterization though.

The release of the long awaited "Meet The Pyro" video finally clears up some things. Namely, that the Pyro is completely insane. While the other characters talk of the monstrous engine of destruction that is the Pyro, who even scares the people on his own team, we get to see things from the Pyro's point of view. Apparently, (s)he thinks (s)he's doling out rainbows and love rather than fire and death. Nothing else is learned about the Pyro, as even in his/her own mind, (s)he's still wearing the gasmask.

Compounded by the fact that Pyro is alternately referred to as "he" and "she," sometimes within the same sentence. "He's not here, is she?"

In Receiver, the protagonist does not even have a character model. Your weapon simply floats in the air in front of you.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted also gives no character model to its protagonist. You can pick your gender, but the only effect this has in-game is whether the person being hunted (i.e. You) is called "Sir" or "Madam".

Idle Game

Crush Crush: The player avatar is depicted as a featureless blob in a humanoid shape. Lampshaded by some of the girls as they try to describe him. You can add hair and a hat, and you're provided with facial features (butt-ugly at first, becoming gradually better-looking as you develop your hobbies), but always staying monochrome.

Interactive Fiction

The Interactive Fiction game Everyone Loves A Parade appears to use this. However, it subverts it. Towards the end of the game, you learn that your character is decidedly female. Using this to your advantage is necessary to actually complete the game.

Interactive fiction game Jigsaw takes this to extremes: Neither the player nor the main villain is ever referred to by gender-specific terms, but only by the names "White" and "Black" (after their costumes), but are taken to be whichever pair of genders the player is most comfortable with, given their evolving romantic relationship. That said, a number of details from the game have been taken to suggest that the two are almost certainly of opposite genders (you are taken to be a honeymooning couple at a time in history when homosexuality is illegal). It is also possible to provoke responses indicating that both Black and White are male, though this is believed to be a bug. One scene set aboard the train bringing Lenin to Petrograd just before the Russian Revolution requires the player to don the uniform of a British Army officer. However, as many people have pointed out (including the game's author), stories of women passing themselves off as male soldiers in times of war are not uncommon in fiction, nor are they unheard of in reality.

Jigsaw's predecessor Curses! was very similar in its presentation, but without the romantic aspect involved, the question was not as urgent.

Downplayed in an interesting way in the Interactive Fiction game Leather Goddesses of Phobos. The game plot features several instances of (heterosexual) sex, so in order for the genders to "match up" the player had to specify his or her gender (but no other details about their character). This was done by making the player go into a restroom — either the men's or women's room.

Since you control a First-Person Ghost and are responsible for all your own dialogue, Façade can involve nothing but this. Trip and Grace will automatically assign you a gender based on the name you pick from the list, but then, you can spend the get-together asserting that you're honestly and truly a woman named Gonzalo and it could be perfectly in-character for that session.

Averted in several Infocom games, especially those based on licensed properties, such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where you are Arthur Dent; James Clavell's Shogun, where you are John Blackthorne; and Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels, where you are Dr. Watson. In Plundered Hearts, Infocom's venture into historical romance, you are clearly female. In Arthur, you are the youngster who will be the legendary King Arthur.

Arguably somewhat made difficult in certain games due to the backstory.

In The Witness, you are a 1930s "gumshoe" private detective and a hostile female calls you "shamus" (a slang term for private investigator) at one point. Given the dated setting of this story, it would be unusual for your character to be anything but White and male.

Hollywood Hijinx makes it difficult to put yourself in the position of the player character given that the background story gives you a rich eccentric uncle and aunt that you may or may not have in real life.

Infidel has pictures of the player character on the box and in the games feelies which clearly depict a White male; Even without this, Word of God intended Infidel to be a very critical deconstruction of the Adventurer Archaeologist so it's only appropriate to envision the character male and White.

Moonmist offers the option to choose your gender, but it seems like a token offer with Stu Galley on record as saying that it was, at it's heart, a Spiritual Adaptation of Nancy Drew; even without Word of God on this, the game's writing make the intended preferred gender evident and many of the game's dialogues and interactions (when written in the 'Choose Male' mode) seem awkward and unnatural. After the introductory part of the game, there is little attempt to bother customizing dialogue and interactions to be gender specific, other than how the player character is addressed.

Averted in most games by Andy Phillips, where the protagonist is usually a specific named person. Played straight in Time: All Things Come to an End which puts you in control of an unnamed Mad Scientist. Certain dialogue from NPCs implies the character is male, but no other details are given.

Mecha Game

In the original MechAssault, the main character was a Featureless Protagonist. As new gameplay elements of the sequel required an onscreen avatar for the main, they were revised into an explicitly male Heroic Mime — to the disappointment of anyone who had previously imagined him as female.

The MechWarrior series has done this for the second game and it's expansions and the third one as well, which they commonly referred to you as "commander" or "lance leader". It stopped around the expansion to the third game when the player character was given a voice, name and gender for each subsequent game since.

Perhaps as a nod to this, though slightly characterized, the player character in The 7th Guest is referred to in the manual as "Ego", Latin for "I", and starts the game with absolutely no idea how he got there or who he is.

The player character in the Dark Parables games is only ever identified as "Detective," and never seen. At most you see gloved hands and jacket-covered arms. The series has confirmed that she's a woman, though.

The player character in the Ravenhearst arc of Mystery Case Files is only ever called "Detective" or "Master Detective." But at the end of Madame Fate, the character's voice is heard speaking on the telephone, revealing that the Master Detective is in fact a woman.

In the Collector's Edition of Fate's Carnival, you can collect bobbleheads of many characters throughout the series. The Master Detective bobblehead is masked and wears a full-length overcoat, making for a very generic figure.

Dire Grove, Sacred Grove provides the option of playing the Master Detective as male or female while conversing with the characters.

A Dark Room has this for the protagonist and most other characters, although some are assigned genders.

All one ever sees of the detective in the Mystery Trackers series is gloved hands.

In the Dark Tales games, the player character is the friend and assistant of the Great Detective C. Auguste Dupin. The character is never seen and has no dialogue wheel. Some games have commentary suggesting that this character is male, but illustrations in other games indicate that she's female. The developers seem to have not quite made up their minds on the subject.

The Dr. Brain series has you as Dr Brain's nameless lab assistant, with the entirety of the first game being your application for the job. Nowhere in any of the games are there any hints about the player's character other than the fact that you're good at solving puzzles.

Pony Island is an Ontological Mystery game that eventually subverts this with the revelation that the protagonist is named Theodore, and he was a Crusader from the 1200s with a wife and kid, though this can only be fully learned by way of multiple playthroughs.

The Room Mobile Game: You are only referred to as 'you' and there are no indications of what you look like whatsoever. Not even hands.

Racing

Destruction Derby games always have these. You're represented by a person whose face is fully obscured by a helmet.

Depending on how much story there is, this can be common. Even when you're in the roofless 1880s-era Mercedes early car in Gran Turismo, you're still in your firesuit and helmet. And taken to an extreme in the Burnout games, where no-one at all is driving.

Same for the Need for Speed games. The PC's face is either obscured by a helmet, or pixellated.

Notable in the first to third games that the windows of the cars are black and opaque enough to be considered illegal.

A dominant "Career" feature in many arcade-sim racing game (NASCAR, MotoGP, Kart, Formula One, etc) where you create a character representing yourself to compete in the championship and scenario modes.

RTS

As mentioned in the description, most RTS games simply have no player character beyond a Non-Entity General.

Tiberian Sun averts this trope as the player actually has a specific character who's seen in cutscenes: Anton Slavik for Nod, and Michael "Mac" McNeil for GDI. James Earl Jones' character in the same game, General James Solomon, was retroactively the GDI player character from Tiberian Dawn. The Firestorm expansion went back to the usual, with the returning Slavik and newcomer Lieutenant General Paul Cortez addressing you directly in cutscenesnote McNeil didn't return, for unknown reasons - the GDI campaign starts off with his command ship crashing in an ion storm, but he's not actually shown or referred to as being aboard it before it goes down, and the novelization of the third game has him still alive and doing his thing in the Third Tiberium War, nearly two decades after Firestorm.

In the initial mission of Kane's Wrath, it's implied that the Nod Commander in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars proper is supposed to be one of the grunts down on the field, while at the end it's revealed that you are LEGION, successor to the mad AI that is CABAL.

Your character in Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight appears to be male, inferred from dialogue with the (still nameless) Commander's wife Lily, and your undergoing plastic surgery to resemble Kane during the story.

The Commander in Dawn of War 2. No information is given about him except that he is recently promoted, a man of few words (he doesn't have any lines - not even unit responses) and so awesome that he is expected to beat back an ork invasion on his own.

In StarCraft and its expansion, the player character was called by titles such as Magistrate, Cerebrate, or Executor depending on what campaign you were playing. The game's expansion, Brood War, the Executor is promoted to a story character, "Artanis", while the player takes on the role of a different Executor. Meanwhile the Zerg PC in the original game is killed by Zeratul in the novel Queen of Blades.

The original release of Dragon Quest IV allowed the player to select a name and gender for their ultimate main character (though unusually, you wouldn't actually get the character until very late into the game, and so could easily be confused when the game first has you playing someone else). However, this breaks down at many points, especially in bath scenes that have decidedly (and presumably unintentional) Les Yay overtones if you're playing a female character.

The DS version of Dragon Quest IV lets you choose your name and gender again, with some of these incidents corrected. They also added a 'Prologue' that lets you see your hero briefly before the main game begins.

Dragon Quest III also allowed you to pick the name and gender of not just your hero, but the rest of your allies. Again, in the original translation of the NES game, several referred to you as 'Ortega's son' — starting with the king himself. This was corrected in later versions, though. Corrected with a Lampshade Hanging: "Ortega's Son... er, I mean, Daughter!"

Dragon Quest IX lets you customize pretty much everything about your hero's (and his/her companions') appearance... and then forces you to don a suit of "Dragon Warrior Armor" whose mask covers your face for a climactic battle and cutscene late in the game!

In general in the series, you are free to customize your protagonist in terms of race, sex, class, appearance, etc. Any games which reference a past game's protagonist (which most frequently occurs within in-game books) will use that character's Red Baron nickname ("The Eternal Champion", "The Emperor's Agent", "The Nerevarine", etc.) while providing as few other details about that character as they can get away with. This is justified, since the current game has no way of knowing how you chose to play the protagonists of previous games - or if you played them at all. Each game does offer its own little quirks, however, usually in terms of how this intersects with Protagonist Without a Past.

The protagonists from Arena and Daggerfall have the most information available about their pasts of any protagonist in the series, but are still customizable. The Eternal Champion of Arena has also been mentioned as being male in later works, giving a rare confirmation of sex.

The Nerevarine of Morrowind is likewise customizable, but does have a few background facts confirmed that make him/her eligible for the Nerevarine prophesy. The Nerevarine was a prisoner, he or she was sent from the Imperial City's prison to Morrowind, there was something special about his or her day of birth ("born on a certain day"), and his or her parents are unknown. A Dunmer Nerevarine wasn't born in Morrowind, either, which still makes him/her to be qualified since the lost prophecies said that the Nerevarine would be an outlander.

Skyrim is completely customizable with the only background fact known being that you tried to hop the border in the wrong place at the wrong time. This leads to some goofy scenarios where features about the protagonist are assumed. When a character reacts to your appearance, they generally act as if you're a scrawny, unimposing kid and on the stupid side - even if you made your character look like a muscular grizzled badass and have him equipped in dragon scale or bone armor.note Which you can only get by killing a dragon and crafting the armor yourself because the dragons only just recently returned to Skyrim.

The first and thirdFinal Fantasy games apply all characterization to your whole party; the individual members are completely interchangeable. This is especially true in III, where you can change your characters' very identities at any time through the job system — all they have to call their own are their names (which you chose).

This is nodded to in Dissidia: Final Fantasy: Onion Knight and Warrior Of Light are called by their class and title, respectively — the Warrior says he doesn't remember his name (because he never had one; it was the player's choice).

The DS re-release of III gives all four characters their own names, personalities and backgrounds, and they each have their own character models for every single possible class.

Etrian Odyssey does this in two ways. One being that all of your guild members have absolutely no background, name, gender, or anything. It's up to you to give them a class, a face (which also defines their gender), and a name.

The other occurrence would be the guild leader. Being impersonated by the player, he even only gets vaguely mentioned in the beginning as one of many daring explorers who are willing to challenge the labyrinth. And the games seem to assume that it's a "he".

Strangely, the guild officer in Etrian Odyssey 2 invites you to register yourself as a member (i.e. name a character after yourself), but the system isn't designed to recognize which character is "you." If you take her up on her suggestion, the narrator will refer to you and your avatar as separate people for the rest of the game.

In the Game Boy version of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the player character portrait is shown as a bust portrait with young, tween-like facial features of ambiguous gender, an ethnically unclear anime look, and hair tied up in a bandanna on the forehead though it's clearly black.

Pokémon X and Y is a very straight example. Not only can you choose your gender, name and now your skin color at character creation, but every other part of your trainer is customizable even after that point. Hair color? Sure. Haircut? Why not. Clothing? A dizzying array of options await you, especially once you have access to every city. The clothing options vary so much that it even gets hard to assign an exact age to the protagonists.

Pokémon Sun and Moon also follow suit in some ways, though it's toned down overall compared to X and Y, with initial customization being mainly just skin color differences. The clothing and haircut options come into play once you enter your first major city and are added on to. You are however reminded several times that canonically your character is at a set age.

While you do get to customize the player character in White Knight Chronicles to a ridiculous degree, in cutscenes (s)he doesn't actually do anything other than stand around and watch the other guys talk about stuff.

Fallout 2 does this somewhat to the player character from the first game. There's a journal entry in the manual from the first game's PC talking about what s/he did after getting exiled from Vault 13 which never states his/her name or gender, but does state that s/he eventually settled down and got married...to a spouse of indeterminate gender with an androgynous name. Eventually, the player runs across a statue honoring the character from the first game, but the text on the statue calls the character "he or she."

Also played mostly straight in Fallout: New Vegas with regards to the player character of Fallout 2: The only details given about the Chosen One are that said person was male and fathered a son on the wife of one of the crime families in New Reno.

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls also use this, but add the option of appearance customization. In the former the character is a person who wanders into Boletaria's fog (for reasons assumed to be exploration, heroism, pillaging, etc) and is referred to by the Maiden in Black as the "Slayer of Demons." In the latter, the character is an Undead who awakens and escapes from the Northern Undead Asylum and is referred to as "The Chosen Undead" by Frampt/Kaathe (of course whether or not this label is accurate depends on how you read the story). The protagonist does not speak other than Yes/No and actions, this actually plays into the games online component where your only method of speech is gestures. The other protagonists are referred to as "The Bearer of the Curse" in Dark Souls 2 and "The Ashen One" Dark Souls 3.

In 7th Dragon each class has four portraits, two for each gender. One portrait in each class would be a Rushe, a race of elvish or cat-people depending on the gender. There are no default names for each portrait except for special names that would give one extra skill point to the class. In 2020, there are only two portraits for each class and the Rushe are gone.

Always Sometimes Monsters attempts to avert this as part of its Central Theme about the importance of choices. While the characters you can choose from all have pretermined appearances and genders, you can still choose whether to play as a male or female, their race, and their sexual orientation. This impacts how others treat you, and can open or close doors accordingly. Somebody might deny you a job opportunity based solely on your looks, for instance.

Simulation Game

The FreeSpace series of games, where the player is only ever addressed as "pilot" or by the wing position "Alpha 1". Just like all the other Red Shirt wingmen, except the Red Shirts actually talk, so they aren't exactly Featureless Protagonists. The only thing we know is that the PC is Terran ("Terran" being the only name the Vasudans use to address the PC, ever).

Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War comes really close to revealing the player character's face. The one thing that stood in its way? Chopper's elbow.

Happens again in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. During the mission briefing for Mission 10, when the briefing is over, the pilots reflections can be seen leaving the room. As theyre leaving, McKinsey adresses Trigger, and one of those pilots turns around. However a window pop up shows up at the exact time to prevent his face from being seen.

Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War makes this a minor plot point. The game's Framing Device is a documentary on the eponymous war ten years afterwards, by a man trying to find out more about the player character and being completely incapable of finding anything concrete other than that he was an insanely skilled pilot.

Star Trek: Bridge Commander plays this straight. You are the nameless Captain (or maybe your name is Captain) of a starship, and nowhere, anywhere, can you get a glimpse of yourself. The entire game runs in first person view. However, a Ferengi is outraged that you allow a woman (your First Officer) talk to him. That makes you very likely male.

In Red Baron the player character has no real characterization whatsoever beyond the player-input name. It can be reasonably deduced that he's male, but this is due to the fact that, other than nurses, there were no female personnel in any of the major armed forces during World War I (officially).

Aerobiz: The player is only known as the CEO and always addressed in second person ("You").

No Man's Sky plays this straight. The developers originally promised that you'll be able to get an idea of what you look like from other players' descriptions, and that you'll be able to help other players you run across figure out what their player-character looks like. However the released game originally had no multiplayer and meeting other people was impossible. Now when you meet other players, they're just floating orbs.

Hacknet implies, like Uplink, that the player is the player character.

Each Animal Crossing game starts in a First-Person Perspective as you ride to your new home, with a character (Kapp'n in Wild World, Rover in the other games) asking for your name. After your name is entered, you say it is cool (burly in Wild World) or cute. What you say will have the other character call you a boy or a girl, and you get a chance to correct them if it's wrong. In the rest of the conversation, your responses determine your actual appearance, which you won't get to see until you arrive at the town. In Happy Home Designer, the game instead starts from the perspective of the animals awaiting your arrival, and Tom Nook has lost your hiring forms, so he has to remember your gender and appearance after asking Lottie for your name, and it's all completely determined by you.

In Papers, Please, the player character is a male head of a household, and shows a small amount of personality through the (unvoiced) dialogue he has with entrants. However, he and the other members his family all remain faceless and nameless, which ironically contrasts with his job being largely about closely scrutinizing other people's names and faces.

If your wife is still alive by the last few days, this turns out to be Downplayed since she finds a family photo. If you guess that the old man is your uncle, then you play as a tall, bearded man with broad shoulders in northern wear, but you barely see anything else.

Stealth-Based Game

The original Castle Wolfenstein games cast the player as an unnamed Allied POW captured by the Nazis during WWII. He would not be named until Id's 3D FPS remake, Wolfenstein 3D.

Survival Horror

Iron Helix: By virtue of the player not actually controlling a living, breathing person, but a zoological probe which is merely being remotely-piloted by the protagonist, the game avoids giving any real detail about them. Not even a name or gender.

Third Person Shooter

In Crackdown, you are only ever called "Agent". The only certain thing is your gender, as there are no female Agent models.

Tower Defense

In Plants vs. Zombies, the protagonist doesn't have much discernible characteristics. But since they have a tricycle, it's an almost-certainty that they are a parent, and probably a single parent. Crazy Dave considers the protagonist a neighbor, so it's also likely that the protagonist owns the (rather nice) house, which means that they are likely to be middle-class.

The trailer for Plants Vs Zombies 2 shows Crazy Dave's house, and one framed newspaper clipping says "Crazy man saves world" so one could guess that the player from the original is Dave all along and he's been talking to himself the whole game. Why? He's crazy.

Turn Based Strategy

Advance Wars puts you in the role of an "adviser" to the Orange Star Army, who is spoken to directly but never shown onscreen. Absolutely nothing is known about your character except that they are new to the job. In practice, your "advising" consists of telling the various generals what to do (they never go against your advice) and they in turn deliver these orders to their troops. This makes your character seem a bit redundant, which is probably why the adviser was removed completely in Advance Wars 2, which puts you in control of the generals directly (which is basically what you were doing in the first game).

Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade does this, too. You're a wandering tactician, and you meet one of the main characters before the first fight. Of course, after the prologue chapters, you're rarely mentioned. In fact, you can actually choose to not have a tactician, in which case the sprite will not appear on the map and the characters will not address you. However, this also means that Athos won't give you the Afa's Drops (a very good item that is almost a must to use on characters like Nino), because he normally hands them to the tactician personally! Otherwise, the differences are fairly minor.

The exceptions are New Mystery of the Emblem, Fire Emblem Awakening, and Fire Emblem Fates. My Unit/The Avatar can either be a boy or a girl, and their looks are freely customized by the player. In New Mystery their fighting class can be chosen, and in Awakening and Fates they have their own Classes: Tactician (which is similar to Magic Knight) in the first and Nohr Prince/Princess (which includes swords and Dragonstones) in the second. The Awakening/Fates avatars even have love interests whom they can marry and have kids with, including the main Lord Chrom in Awakening if the Avatar is a girl.

And yet in the love confessions and the plot-important CGs describing their in-story position as the Soul Jar of Grima (Awakening) and the Child of Two Worlds (Fates), the Avatar's face is never clearly shown.

When the Avatars of both Awakening and Fates were revealed as fighters for Smash 4, he/she used the default appearance and name (Robin and Corrin, respectively).

Faceless (and even more so, nameless) protagonists are becoming a Dead Horse Trope in visual novels now days. More story-based games sometimes maintain the faceless look early in the game, but then reveal the protagonist's face in cutscenes later in the story when the player has gotten to know the character better.

In most dating sims, the male protagonist (being, effectively, the player's stand-in) when he is on screen is a vaguely dark-haired youth whose bangs conveniently hides his face if he is ever seen from the front. Dating sims with female protagonists, and sound novel-type dating sims, tend to avoid this and do show the girl's face from the beginning.

This Dating Sim trend is spoofed in Crush Crush where the protagonist is depicted as just a generic human-shaped white blob who looks quite out of place in CGIs with the far more vividly-drawn girls. The girls even refer to the protagonist as "Marshmallow" at several points, implying that the protagonist literally is just a white blob.

Toyed with in The Prince of Tennis dating sims. The first one, Gakuensai no Oujisama, never shows the face of the brunette main girl note (default name: Shizuka Hirose), and there are extremely few mentions to her possible looks (i.e., Kawamura's path implies that she uses glasses). In the other two, Umibe no Secret and Sanroku no Mystic, the girls's faces are clearly seen from the beginning (Sanroku's Tsugumi Obinata is a long-haired girly girl, Umibe's Ayaka Tsujimoto is a short-haired tomboy), and yet sometimes the CG's deliberately show them only from behind or from angles where we cannot see their faces, despite us already knowing how they look like.

The Shall We Date? series used to play this trope painfully straight in their earliest games, taking great pains to never show the otome protagonist's face even during the kissing scenes. However, their later games like Love Tangle and Lost Alice avert this trope by giving their protagonists actual faces and backstories.

The Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side games give the heroine a defined appearance, that of a generically cute girl with reddish-brown hair in a bob cut, but she's only fully displayed as a Super-Deformed sprite in game menus and minigames, while CGs typically avoid showing much more than the back of her head.

Since the player is meant to be the protagonist in the Death Room, you don't get an in-game sprite.

The nameable protagonist of Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ is supposed to be the player himself. He's represented with an eyeless face and has no personality outside of being a dorky otaku. Since the game is specifically made with a foreign audience in mind, he's an Occidental Otaku by definition.

Hatoful Boyfriend's Hiyoko Tousaka has a very vivid, hammy personality and a defined past - but no canon appearance or voice actor. In the manga she breaks the fourth wall to say that it's like an FPS, so the viewer will never see her - in a later issue they do, but she's covered in mushrooms.

Higurashi: When They Cry only pretends to be a dating sim at first, so it follow this trope for half of it. Later it is revealed the true series protagonist is someone else and the previous main character gains a face (the new protagonist was present since the beginning, so they had a face already).

Higurashi also played it straight with a third protagonist of sorts. As the sequences taking place outside of the Fragments in which you were only described as a "Special Existence". Sometimes it seemed to be Breaking the Fourth Wall and other times suggesting that you were a genuine entity within the game's universe. This trope most comes into play in the first such encounter, in which another spirit being refers to you as it's sister. However they then point out that you might be a boy, but telling the gender of such beings is complicated. These sequences were also in second person, in contrast to the rest of the novel.

Umineko: When They Cry averts it, by giving the main character a face from the beginning. The author even commented he wanted to avoid having the main character go faceless for so long again.

Averted in Katawa Shoujo, as we see Hisao Nakai's face clearly in one of the first CG's and his features are almost never hidden from then on. He also has an established personality, though some of it does vary from route to route, which could be either attributed to the influence of whom he spends time with on his personality, or, if you're feeling less charitable, just chalked up to a case of Depending on the Writer. Oh, and he has arrythmia, meaning that not only do he have a name, face, and personality, but also a medical history.

Played with in Key/Visual Arts' works, though the male protagonists actually have a strong characterization. Some protagonists are more bland than others, though (i.e. in Planetarian). Their earliest release, Kanon tried to play this straight, though fans generally associate Yuuichi's appearance with the one given in Kyo Ani's anime adaptation.

Little Busters! takes it even further - Riki does have sprites, though they only show up in special situations, and while most CGs don't show his face, a fair few still do. He even has a voice, though he only speaks during batting practice, while battling, during the scenes where Masato, Kengo, or Kyousuke become the POV character, and in the scene where the boys disappear.

The makers of some of the Key VNs made an older title called One Kagayaku Kisetsu E which plays this up to the point of stupidity. In CG in which Kouhei is kissing someone, he will have no eyes, nose, etc. depending on the scene. Funnily enough, you actually get a clear view of the back of his head very early on in the story.

Success mode in MLB Power Pros averts this with your avatar being customizable and shown all the times throughout the game; while the character itself is portrayed as a local Idiot Hero who loves baseball. It helps that half of the gags come from your avatar's hilarious facial reactions.

The protagonists of the Romance Games produced by Voltage Inc are depicted without eyes when they appear in CGs - sometimes by the use of a Blinding Bangs effect, but often their faces are simply blank where their eyes should be. The short introductory animation of Office Secrets does show the protagonist with eyes, but in the in-game CG that the footage was based on, she's eyeless.

In one of the spin-offs of In Your Arms Tonight, it gives you the option of displaying the MC's sprite, which gives you a clear image of what she looks like, face and all, subverting this trope.

War: 13th Day follows this trope to great effect. The player is meant to think they're the protagonist when in reality, they're one of the characters in the story.

Mystic Messenger lets you choose which photo you want to use as your avatar and you can even use a photo of yourself if you want, but your character is still always depicted as a generic-looking brown-haired woman with no eyes in CGs and no dialogue outside of the choices you make for her.

Five Nights at Freddy's: You never get to see the appearance of the night guard, because the game is in first person. The only thing that's been revealed about them is their name Mike Schmidt and their eye colour on the game over screen; they're blue. In the second game, you can only find out what their name is: Jeremy Fitzgerald. There's also a third guard who goes by Fritz Smith, but we don't know a thing about him either. The player character in the third game has No Name Given, and even has Ambiguous Gender since their terrified hyperventilation could be that of a man or a low-voiced woman. The appearance and personalities of these protagonists are left to the player's imagination. It's actually a bit of a shock that the player character in the fourth game averts this somewhat (we only know his appearance, and even then, it's only a rough, 8-bit approximation).

Emily Is Away is an "interactive story" that takes place entirely over AOL Instant Messenger, so naturally we never see what the protagonist (or anyone else for that matter) looks like. Nothing about your character's gender or appearance is ever mentioned, but it is defined that you start the story as a high school senior and end it as junior in college. You get to pick both a screen name and the first name or nickname Emily will address you asnote or let the program pick one or both out or a randomized list, and the dialogue avoids using third person pronouns or any other language that would imply gender. However, whether you pick a male or female name, your character is canonically attracted to females, since the plot has you romantically pursuing Emily and another girl named Emma at different points.

We know absolutely nothing about the main character of Potion Maker except that they are a talented alchemist and the girls find them attractive.

DownWell The protagonist has a featureless white body. The official game description does tell us that they are young.

The protagonist of Ensemble Girls! has this as a gimmick, given his lack of uniform, minimal backstory, and namelessness (his default name remained "Transfer Student" for years). His female counterpart/sister from Ensemble Stars!, on the other hand, has a little less ambiguity; despite having no face and looking fairly plain like her predecessor, she she at least has a Canon Name (Anzu), and her past, while on the backburner, is visible— parts of it even showed up in the former's Expanded Universe novels.

Non Video Game Examples

Fan Fic

Pretty much is all "X Reader" fics are this by design. Some examples less Squicky than others.

In the Heroes of the Storm fanfic Heroes of the Desk, the "Player" character is this. The only known facts about them are: they play Heroes of the Storm (duh), they own a powerful gaming computer, and they probably live in America somewhere. The Player has lines (unlike the First-Person Shooter above), but both characters and narration go out of their way to avoid ascribing any definite characteristics to the Player. They don't even have a Gender-Blender Name!

A Brighter Dark: Given that the original game allowed allowed players to create their own character, the author took pains to make as few assumptions about the protagonist's appearance as possible. With some exceptions: Their name is Corrin, Corrin is female, and she has pale skin that is typical among Nohrians.

Lone Wolf's title character is explicitly male from the outset, and his race, the Sommlending, are described as white-skinned and blond-haired. However, during the New Order Kai series, when the protagonist is one of Lone Wolf's top pupils, the narrative goes to ridiculous lengths to avoid calling him by name, mostly having characters refer to him as "Grand Master". There is even a random table set up in the books to help players generate their own Meaningful Name for their character.

Most Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks portrayed "you" as a child or teenager of unspecified gender... who, in the illustrations, was sometimes slightly androgynous but almost always unmistakably white, and often clearly male.

There were a few books, however, where the history and/or illustrations would consistently portray the protagonist as a tomboyish girl. Mystery of the Maya as well as The Magic of the Unicorn were two.

Jay Liebold's Mystery of the Ninja series started with a protagonist drawn as a boy with a ponytail, but the following titles made said main character a long-haired girl.

Fight for Freedom was set in apartheid-era South Africa, and with your dark skin a few bad things happen.

Edward Packard's Your Code Name is Jonah (reissued as Spy Trap) averts this, however, as your character is clearly an adult male. Which makes it more plausible since your character is a government agent.

Fighting Fantasy books never drew your player character and no-one ever remarked upon your gender (although the cover art for some of the early American editions would depict a generic male fantasy warrior).

Another had you wake up in a sarcophagus with no memory; as such, you were some character of significance, and you had to learn about your past over the course of the story, culminating in a fight with the people that put you in the tomb.

The protagonist of GrailQuest is a young person named Pip whose body the player occupies. Pip was never referred to as any specific gender or illustrated from the neck up (with one exception, but then it was of Pip's head exploding so it was still gender-neutral).

The Destiny Quest books go to pains to avoid presuming anything about your character except for a few minor background details, even referring to you as "them" or "themselves" in dialogue when some kind of pronoun has to be used. At least in the first book, though, sometimes it slips and refers to you as male.

In the Star Challenge books, even if the reader is referred in second person and there're very little -if any- clues about him/her in the text, illustrations depict the PC as a young, white male.note And likely of blond hair (illustrations are in black and white). Covers, however, show you having dark hair.

Averted in the Endless Quest series and its spinoff Heart Quest, where your character's name, gender and species are laid out on the bottom of the page explaining how the book works.

Pinball

In general, because there is no virtual avatar for a pinball game, there isn't any need to visually identify the player character, if one exists at all. As a result, this trope has been a frequent sight in pinball up to this day. This trope even shows up in Licensed Pinball Tables, where an inversion of Cipher Scything occurs in which the pinball team will add in a Featureless Protagonist who interacts with the existing characters. After all, the player is always represented as a shiny metal ball, which can potentially stand for anything. It says something about this trope's ubiquitousness in pinball that the pinball communities' equivalent term for "player character" is "role," a word broad enough that it doesn't necessarily have to have any defining characteristics.

The protagonist in Banzai Run is never given any description aside from being a racer and male.

The same goes for the fellow pinball table about motorcycle racing Full Throttle. What story exists is defined entirely by the antagonist Francisco Valentino's interactions with the player character.

All that's known about the player protagonist in Varkon is that he's a white man with blonde hair.

In The Addams Family, the player is a guest to the Addams' mansion. It is unclear if the player is even an individual or a group, considering sometimes Gomez says, "Look, everyone! We have guests!" when a game begins.

There is no explanation on who the player character is in The Simpsons Pinball Party except that the character is male (possibly by accident) and is of legal age to drink alcohol.

In both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the player character is someone who has joined the cast of characters on their journey and has to earn their respect by proving oneself helpful in situations that occur through the books they were based on (though they are technically adaptations of the movies).

The player character in Whirlwind is a civilian caught in the rage of a storm system generating tornadoes. Any characters speaking directly to the player character does so in the imperative mood.

The Chicago roller coaster trilogy of Comet, Cyclone, and Hurricane all have their player characters as a visitor to the carnival or theme park in which they're located, with no further description. Subsequent machines themed on amusement parks like Jolly Park and RollerCoaster Tycoon follow suit, though the latter, in the spirit of the video games they're based on, also has the player character opening rides and improving the park. Still no physical or behavioral description whatsoever though.

A strange case with Ghostbusters: You play as one of the ghost-catching quartet, but it's unclear which.

In Cactus Canyon, you are the sheriff's new hire to the Wild West town, tasked with cleaning up the criminal mess the town is in. The player character is suggested to be male, as the saloon girls seem to show romantic and/or sexual interest in the player character, but considering no one ever uses any third-person pronouns to describe the player character, there is room for Alternate Character Interpretation of a female law enforcement officer as the player character.

In Attack from Mars, you are part of Earth's special forces assigned to observe and fight the Martians. No other information is given about you.

The player character IS actually depicted in Medieval Madness and is shown to be clearly male, but he doesn't appear in any of the artwork, only on the dot-matrix display, whose resolution is too low and whose colors are too limited to clearly make out any physical characteristics other than that he has hair and has a nose. Any close-up shots of this character has him in full armor and thus completely obscured.

Tabletop Games

In the solo D&D adventure "Blade of Vengeance", the pre-generated character is an elf whose gender is deliberately never specified, even on the enclosed family tree that names (and gives genders for) all the relatives he/she is attempting to avenge. The interior artwork depicts the PC as androgynous.

In Wreck-It Ralph, they lampshade the fact that in first person shooters, your perspective is a surround view of the landscape with two arms in front of you and a rifle. In this case, they show that in Hero's Duty, the player is not playing as a human soldier, but rather, is controlling a short, nondescript, voiceless robot with a gun in one arm and a two-way TV screen for a face. Outside of gameplay, it does have its own personality  in particular, it takes offense at Ralph getting too close to it during gameplay and causing the player an untimely Game Over.

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